Eleven veils

Eleven veils
Steps towards freedom

Nemir Adjina

1
 Eleven veils

Introduction

These shorts essays comprise an intense course in self

understanding. Although delivered in a casual relaxed manner,
they are intended to provoke sincere reflection. The reader is
asked to put to the test the conclusions that are drawn.

The theory that the earth revolves around the sun was first put
forward by the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd
century BC, 2400 years ago. However it was not until Isaac
Newton in the late 18th century that this truth was accepted as
fact. Common sense experience and daily life are still mostly lived
as if the sun revolves around the earth, but we know that this is
an illusion.
What is being presented here is none other than an ancient truth
first described thousands of years ago in India, a truth not about
the physical world but about the observer of the world and the
relationship the observer has with the world.
This truth is called Yoga in Sanskrit, which means Union. Just as
the sun appears to revolve around the earth, we as humans
appear to be separate from one another and from the material
universe. This separation is an illusion. Yoga is the means to make
this illusion clear, and so to live in truth, not error.

2
 Eleven veils

Table of Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................... 2
Outer Veils ................................................................................................. 4
The veil of red rose petals ........................................................................................................................ 4
The veil of sunlight ................................................................................................................................... 5
The veil of flesh and bones ....................................................................................................................... 6
The veil of neurons .................................................................................................................................. 7

Inner veils .................................................................................................. 8

The veil of thought ................................................................................................................................... 8
The veil of desire...................................................................................................................................... 9
The veil of blind belief .............................................................................................................................10
The veil of the personality .......................................................................................................................11
The veil of knowledge .............................................................................................................................12
The veil of separation..............................................................................................................................13

Behind the veil ......................................................................................... 14

Patanjali’s Yoga System ........................................................................... 15

3
 Eleven veils

Outer Veils

The outer veils concern our perception and understanding of the world of time and
space. Whether we are enjoying the perfume of the rose, or studying the farthest
reaches of the universe, or watching a game of football, we are involved in a type of
experience. The outer veils mask the true operation of that experience, leading to
belief that is not based on fact.

The veil of red rose petals

Please come and sit with me awhile, bring some tea and make yourself comfortable.

Let us look at those beautiful roses with the red petals and the mystical perfume.
How the rose has enchanted us through the ages, its beauty and its thorns, its
perfume that only is found in roses grown naturally, not the faux natural roses of
today.

Let us examine closely at what happens when we look at the rose.

Sunlight from the window is bouncing off the red petals of the rose, scattering in all
directions. Some, a very small percentage of that reflected light, enters your eyes.
Light enters your eyes and activates nerves in your retina, which then send an
electrical impulse along the optic nerve to the vision centre in your brain, at which
point you “see” the colour red and the rose.

Now, we know from the physicists and biologists that it is not red light that is carried
along your optic nerve, the light from the rose does not go further than your eye.
There is no red light inside your brain, no electromagnetic waves travelling though
tubes. It is all electrochemical impulses. But until that electrochemical impulse
arrives at the vision centre of your brain, you do not see the rose at all. The vision of
the rose is somehow created by your brain as a response of the signal arriving from
the nerve.

So, my question to you is, where does that red colour come from and what is it
made of?

There is only one logical answer, it is somehow created by your brain and it is made
of imagination.

4
 Eleven veils

The veil of sunlight

Ok, so far so good, standard childhood textbook stuff. We have seen that the only
explanation of the redness of the rose, or its enchanting smell, is that it is somehow
imagined by the brain as a result of being stimulated by electro chemical signals, it is
in other words a stimulated imagination.

But lets us take a step further, let us go to the window and look at the sun. You turn
your face to the sun, if it is too bright, please close your eyes. All is light, your mind
is full of bright sunlight.

However, just as it is true for the rose, it is true for the sun. Your mind is full of light,
yet if I look into your ears it is pitch black. Your mind is full of light yet there is no
light in your brain!

Like it or not, accept it or not, the facts as proven by science mean we must accept
that all the light we have ever seen, and all the other experiences we have had of
life, are nothing other than the stimulations of the imaginative faculty of the brain
by the nerve signals in the body. Moreover we have no way of knowing if our
imagined experience bears any resemblance to the “real” world which we
experience.

As a matter of fact, the sun is completely dark, there is no such thing as “light”, only
radiation, a kind of energy. “Light” is created by the brain and the eye when they
come into contact with that energy, always was and always will be.

This strange scenario is actually what modern science and materialism amount to.
Of course we all live our lives as if the world we see is the same as the world out
there, and it does correspond convincingly. But, we need to go further....

5
 Eleven veils

The veil of flesh and bones

We have shown that our experience of the “world out there” is in fact an internal
mental projection, which may or may not resemble reality. This in itself should be
enough to give one pause for thought about the assumptions that govern our lives
and that we take for granted.

But, we must go further in our scientific investigation of the nature of reality and
experience. We must apply the same scrutiny to our experience of our own bodies,
the context for the experience of “in here “and “out there”.

Remember the red rose? Well now look at your pink finger nails, is it not true that
the only reason you know you have finger nails is because of the information (sight,
touch, feeling) that is mediated to your brain by your nervous system?

Our relationship to our finger nails is also a creation of our imagination.

Can we extend this understanding to our skin? Skin contains many nerves, it is itself
an organ of sense perception, it is intimately part of what we call ourselves and
forms the boundary between the inner and outer realities.

We are aware of our skin because we see it, feel it. Yet however intimately it is
connected to our sense of self, all our understanding, and its very qualities and
properties are a result of our imaginative capacity in the brain acting on nerve
impulses.

Skin, and muscles and bones do have one characteristic that sets them apart from
other objects, they respond to our will. Our body is an instrument for the
engagement of our will in with the world, in that sense it is part of who we are, but
its actual qualities and existence are no more “real” than the rose.

6
 Eleven veils

The veil of neurons

So far we have talked about the brain creating images and experience out of nerve
impulses. Creating an inner world on the basis of information from an unknown
outer world. This is the basic understanding of materialism which is the dominant
understanding of science, although not what most people would recognize as their
everyday experience. This view has led to what is called the hard problem of
philosophy, how consciousness arises out of the interactions of neurons in the brain.

According to this view, the brain is the locus of mind, brain somehow creates
consciousness as a result of its complexity, and as long as you have a functioning
material brain then you are alive.

This view reinforces the dualistic view of a material world and an imagined one,
mind and body. Yet a closer look is needed.

Modern anatomy, of which neuro-anatomy is a part, arose out of the dissection of

cadavers, much like the study of botany, the study of plants and flowers.

We have seen that the existence of flowers is a mysterious product of the

imagination. Is there any reason to believe that the existence of neurons is any
different?

The brain and all it qualities are no more real than the rose.

The brain is merely the most complex flower that we have encountered, yet all we
know about it is a product of our imagination, of our consciousness.

Even your brain is part of your mind.

There is only one conclusion open to us, that nature, body and brain, are all part of a
vast play of consciousness.

We must even drop the idea of an unknown reality “out there” which is experienced
by our nervous system, as even our nervous system is part of that same reality.
There is no in here or out here, all is mind.

There is no other logical explanation.

So, the rose is red after all, it is also you, and so is the sun!

7
 Eleven veils

Inner veils

The inner veils are those which clearly exist within our minds, they constitute the
qualities of mind: thought and emotion, our personality.

Perhaps even more than our bodies, we are convinced of the authenticity of our
personality, that we are thoughts and feelings.

The veil of thought

Here we are confronted by the most subtle and invisible of veils, our thoughts.
Humanity has invented language and uses it to think. Having created a set of simple
letters, we use them to identify objects and experiences, and through the process of
memory, manipulate the words in our minds to explore the world and ourselves.

Our thoughts are what constitute our personality, our idea of who we are. Yet
thinking is no more than writing in our minds. The particularity of all writing is that it
consists of making a mark on a surface. So, in the same way that these letters are
arranged upon the surface of the page, our thoughts are arranged on the surface of
our mind. They weave a veil that obscures the existence of the background upon
which they have their existence, just as these words capture your attention whilst
you ignore the white page upon which they are written.

Yet, in the space between your thoughts, are you not also there? Does that space
belong to someone else? Is it not also you?

8
 Eleven veils

The veil of desire

Desire, the movement of energies of attraction and repulsion, independent of

thought. Desire is indeed mysterious, most of us are held by it to a greater or lesser
degree. It appears as a force that comes from some unknown part of us, drawing us
in, sometimes against our will or better judgement.

Yet desire is still a relational object in consciousness. We can choose how we relate
to the desire acting in us, to follow it blindly, ignore it or suppress it, or to deal with
it rationally. We are not desire, it is not essential to what we are, it is another veil
masking our true understanding, until it is unmasked and understood.

Desire grows in power according to our feelings of vulnerability or confusion,

instead of being a faithful servant of our true self, our inner confusion causes us to
identify with it. We allow desire to run freely because it feels powerful and affords
us a sense of release from our suffering. Instead of riding desire to take us where we
want, we allow it to run around dragging us wherever it wants, it is an abdication of
responsibility.

Desire is neither good nor bad, it is a part of nature.

9
 Eleven veils

The veil of blind belief

As should be clear by now, this veil is more common than we like to think. Modern
life is characterized by a kind of blind belief in science and that we actually know
what life is. In fact, science has no idea what life is, it also has no idea what
consciousness is or where it comes from. Science is unable to explain Gravity, why
the material world exists at all, what love is. Science cannot explain you. These are
not small or trivial matters, they are absolutely fundamental.

Try this small experiment: Move your index finger of your right hand and try to
understand how you did it. How did you cause neurons to stimulate the contraction
of your muscles? You just did it, the mechanism however is completely mysterious.

How you move, how you think, how you know, who you are, are complete mysteries
today. To put ones faith in a system of knowledge that does not explain the basic
facts of being alive, is blind belief and a characteristic of fundamentalist and closed
thinking.

10
 Eleven veils

The veil of the personality

Personality, from the Latin Persona, means a mask. We make so much of our
personality, our mask, we confuse it for what we are. You are not your personality.

Our personality is the mask we present to ourselves and the world. We may not
even like our personality, may wish to change it or improve it, believing that it is the
cause of our suffering. Lacking clear understanding we mistake the mask we wear
for the actor inside, we forget who we truly are.

The problem is only amplified, the veil thickened, by the resulting cult of the
personality, our identification with so called successful personality traits and our
attempts to achieve happiness through addressing defects in our personality.

If you suffer from your personality, it is a symptom, not a cause.

Generally our personality results from our struggles for survival to satisfy our
biological needs. We learn early on which kind of behaviour results in being
nourished and loved. As we grow older we adapt our behaviour to ensure that we
obtain what we believe to be our biological or existential needs, but by that time we
have already lost sight of our true nature and have come to identify ourselves with
our personality.

Often a difficult or problematic personality can result in the individual rejecting the
mask, a crisis of identity ensues which however painful, offers the possibility of self
discovery and living life as an authentic individual, the so called mid life crisis or
even breakdown.

Personality is basically the sum of all the other veils or masks. It is the combined
effect of ignorance, desire, thought, the veils of flesh and bones, life and death, they
are masks, personas, and together they make up the great personality, the
imposter!

11
 Eleven veils

The veil of knowledge

Peeling away the layers of falsehood, we approach the truth. Having removed all the
masks, we begin to perceive who we are underneath, we begin to know. At this
point the veil is made of a very fine material, and great discrimination is needed to
identify it.

Having removed all our false identities, we may ask what is left? What are we, if we
are not the personality? What remains?

Well, knowing remains, we know that we are.

This is true, yet it contains a trick.

How do we know that we know?

We say so, we say “I AM”, and these words somehow reflect back to us our knowing
that we exist.

Yet supposing we never think or say those words?

What is there? Who is there? In that silence?

Our whole identity is precisely predicated on that ability we have to think the letter
“I” or its equivalent in any language. Everything follows from that. We know that we
exist, and that knowing gives rise to its expression “I”, but before we expressed that
knowing, before we I-dentified our selves, who are we?

It is almost as if without the letter “I” there is nothing, but we know there is
something, just that we cannot put our finger on it. It is not knowledge of
something, it is just a knowing.

This is the last veil but one.

12
 Eleven veils

The veil of separation

If you have come this far, you will observe that what you really are, is something
that knows.

The last veil is exactly this mistake. You are not something or someone which knows,
you are knowing itself.

To be is to know, to know is to be.

You are not apart from anything, not involved in a relationship of any kind. You have
removed the illusion of the so called material world, removed the illusion of your
body, and removed the illusion of your thoughts and your desires, left behind
everything you thought you were.

What is left?

You are, you know it.

If you try to find a You without the knowing, you cannot.

You and knowing are the same. Knowing is consciousness, being is consciousness,
life is consciousness, reality is consciousness is you.

You are that.

You are the whole show, actor, stage, lights and spectator, it is all one great knowing
that is going on.

If you choose to believe that you are just a part of some greater thing, that you
somehow exist apart from everything, that is your choice. You are free to do so,
enjoy the show!

This is ancient knowledge, nothing new.

13
 Eleven veils

Behind the veil

Although we have lifted the veils and revealed certain strange facts of existence,
there is still one mysterious quality which we have not examined, and that is will.

Will is that strange power we have to do something. It is very difficult to step back
and analyse will, it remains mysterious, it is simply something that we do, even
though we have no understanding of how we do it!

How do we think? How do we initiate the movement of our bodies? We do not

know and we cannot know.

For this reason we cannot say that will is a veil, we cannot create a relationship with
will, it is beyond language, beyond memory. It is a power that we have that is also
something that we are, and it is somehow connected to consciousness.

Will is the ability of consciousness to direct itself. It is perhaps the unique attribute
of consciousness, its one dynamic quality.

In a sense Truth, Consciousness and Will are the same.

Please go through the arguments and explanations contained in this book and try to
find fault with them.

14
 Eleven veils

Patanjali’s Yoga System

If you are interested in realizing truth as a direct experience that is not the result of
logic or rationality, you could do worse than to take up meditation or yoga. There
are many different techniques available. Personally I have experience in the system
of Yoga as described in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, written sometime between
500BC and 500 AD. For that reason only it is the system I can recommend.

Patanjali’s Yoga system is sometimes called Raja Yoga, or Kriya Yoga, but as both
those names have become identified with particular schools and their methods, I
prefer to use the term Patanjali Yoga to avoid confusion.

Patanjali instructs us to approach Yoga or Union in three ways: 1) Purification

(Tapas) of Body and Mind through Asana, Pranayama and Meditation, 2) Study and
self Inquiry (Svadhyaya) and 3) Trust (Isvaropranidhana).

The purpose of such practices as meditation is to simplify experience to such a point

that it becomes clear who you are. It is to arrive at the ever present, never absent
space in between your thoughts, at that which is unchanging in your life, in your
universe, and to recognize that as who you are essentially.

The purpose of Self Inquiry is to arrive at an understanding of the Truth through

reason and logic.

The purpose of Trust is to open the heart to the unknowable intelligence which is
working through us and of which we are a part.

Yoga teaches that all our suffering is caused by ignorance or non seeing (Avidya).
This non-seeing or veiling is the chief cause of all the mischief in the world. The
illusion of separation causes us to consider only our own interests, to abuse our
fellow humans, to abuse the planet and to become drunk on the quest for personal
power, fame and riches. On the planetary level we are finding out to our cost that
everything is connected, that humans are not separate from nature and from each
other, but even our personal lives, to the extent that they contain fear, guilt, misery
and conflict, are held in a state of suffering by this ignorance.

You are free, beautiful and ever safe, all that you seek is actually what you are.
Follow the ancient oracle and Know thyself!

15